Blog

How to hang onto yourself in the Holiday season?

Christmas and New Years are coming up, and the arena where family and friends gather can be really big. The expectations from different family members, friends, or just the cultural differences of ‘this is how we do things’, can be overwhelming.

Often in broken families there is more then one place where we have to show up and many different relationships to manage.

I want to share with you a few tricks that help me to manage:

Before I part take in any of the gatherings, be it a Christmas Eve celebration or a Hanukka dinner, I check in with my driving value.

Why is this important to me? Often it is about future generations, and traditions and rituals, love and compassion. Of course there are many more I could write here, but for the process, it is actually important to choose only a few.

So let’s say for this example I choose future generations.

I sit for a second, just checking in with my body, taking in a few easy breaths and then see where do I notice the importance of future generations in my body. I focus on the sensations. I notice a broadness around my back, the bottom of my spine is flexible and stable at the same time. I let colors images sounds or any other information arrive to me. I sit with, in this case a big green warm blob kind of thing that makes my back feel really big and strong 🙂 for a little while and I just notice how this valuing of future generations is inside of me, it is part of me, and at the same time my whole body is relaxed and flexible.

Later, when I enter into the gatherings, where often there are conversations that make me uncomfortable, or I catch little grimaces people make as their feelings instead of being expressed just seep through their faces, I check in with my body. After a little tightening up, as my nervous system responds to the discomfort, I breathe in. I notice the sensations that are representing the value of future generations in me, and I let my body and nervous system relax.

In this way I do not get to caught up in worrying about the uncomfortable things and I can manage to hang onto myself and even enjoy the gathering.